How many of you have contributed/gave feedback to your standards committees?

Question

Ok as programmers we all follow programming standards (as in W3 standards, or C++ standard, etc...), and many of us consider these standards "sacred" and also many seasoned programmers can recite their choice of standards by heart when asked about a question in their field of expertise. You can see this last case a lot here on SO by the way!

However I think most programmer's aren't aware that these standards are decided by committees of humans, and that our standards are actually living standards that constantly change to meet the current needs based on feedback (HTML5.0, Perl6.0, C++0x) etc...

Now my personal modus-operandi recently has been to read the upcoming standards that will affect me, and if I have concerns I don't rant, I mail the consortium explaining my concerns and suggestions. Many times I get positive responses, other times I get well explained reasoning why it can't be done, and of course other times I just get ignored :) However I know I tried, and did an effort to make the standard better.

So I was wondering if I'm some kind of standards freak, or if this kind of behavior is common among other SO users?

Answer 1

freak ;-)

[in a good way]

[I served on the OMG committee for OO Design standards back in the 1990s, so i guess that makes me a bit of a freak too ;-)]

Answer 2

As a former prominent member of standards committees (C#, CLI), I personally appreciated public input on the standard. We, in fact, released interim draft standards a couple of times and got some public eyes on them before they were officially ratified.

It's all about getting a fresh pair of eyes -- the folks working on the standards can sometimes become numb and gloss over some of the simplest mistakes.

That said, you have to balance answering public criticism with actually completing the standard.

Answer 3

Perl has neither a standard nor a committee, but I've participated from time to time in the mailing list (known as p5p) where its many authors and maintainers communicate among themselves, and I've written an article (README.macosx) that's part of the Perl docs.

A long time ago, in a web far far away, I responded when the W3C asked for feedback on the first version of the draft CSS proposal. It's interesting that my suggestion, that reader-specified !important rules should override !important rules specified by the authors, was not followed for CSS1, but it was eventually adopted in CSS2.

Answer 4

I have submitted comments to standards committees from time to time. I notice that I am more appreciative and willing to do that when comments and their discussion are public somewhere. Even so, I have submitted comments to write-only input points and occassionally been pleased to receive a response, often much later, on the disposition of my comment.

As a current member of a few standards-development committees, I can tell you that external comments and feedback are prized. There are also organizations, such as OASIS, where the importance of external comments and their responsible disposition is part of the rules for operating a TC.

External feedback lets us know that there are people paying attention that care about the work. I know we also disappoint people when we don't respond openly and quickly. I also realize that for feedback that involves proposals that are essentially feature requests, we are often not limited by what is considered in scope and, in particular, whether anyone is willing (or already has) to implement the requested feature.

In any case, feedback to the standards-development and -clarification processes is extremely valuable. (And if the effort you go through to provide input is not valued, that is usually easy to detect.) This is not much different than the submission of bugs and feature requests for software that you are using, as well.